International Review of Management and Marketing ISSN: 2146-4405 available at http: www.econjournals.com International Review of Management and Marketing, 2021, 11(1), 36-47. International Review of Management and Marketing | Vol 11 • Issue 1 • 2021 36 Self-Leadership and Empowering Leadership in a Western Balkan Context Peter Nientied 1 *, Merita Toska 2 1 Independent researcher, Rotterdam, the Netherlands and Research Fellow, Polis University, Tirana, Albania, 2 Co-PLAN Institute for Habitat Development, Tirana, Albania and Polis University, Tirana, Albania. *Email: nientied1@chello.nl Received: 20 October 2020 Accepted: 25 December 2020 DOI: https://doi.org/10.32479/irmm.10893 ABSTRACT In to-day’s dynamic business world, a trend is towards more fexible organisations with enhanced autonomy and self-leadership of employees and teams. This study introduces the concepts of self-leadership and empowering leadership in the Western Balkans. The study measures employed professionals’ views of self-leadership and experienced empowering leadership. Special attention is given to possible diferences in views by gender and by professionals with/without a leadership role. Two instruments are applied, the Revised Self-Leadership Questionnaire and the Empowering Leadership Survey (n = 265). Subsequently interviews were conducted with 10 company directors to generate their viewpoints and experiences of self- leadership and empowering leadership. Results show correlations between self-leadership and empowering leadership and show diferences between men’s and women’s reports. The study also notes that better understanding the potential of empowering leadership leading to more self-leadership demands another type of research. A discussion of the study and suggestions for future research conclude the article. Keywords: Self-leadership, Empowering Leadership, Self-management, Western Balkans, Albania JEL Classifcations: M12, M19, M54 1. INTRODUCTION Globalisation, ICT developments, changing political forces and other factors, have led to a new context for organisations. This ever-changing business environment has been referred to as a VUCA world; volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous (Lawrence, 2013). Modern organisations streamline eforts to adjust towards more responsiveness to this changing environment and modify their organisational design and functioning. Many organisations aim at more fexibility in their bureaucracy, delegating decision making and working with self-managing teams (Clegg et al., 2016; Fong and Snape, 2015; Houghton and Yoho, 2005; Quintero et al., 2015). Leadership for modern organisations in a VUCA environment is diferent from conventional transactional leadership; amongst many others, Furr and Dyer (2015) suggest that leadership needs to be more entrepreneurial. One of their roles is enabling adaptive processes, by creating space for ideas advanced by entrepreneurial leaders to engage in tension with the operational system and generate innovations that scale into the system to meet the adaptive needs of the organization and its environment (Uhl-Bien and Arena, 2018). In modern organisations more is expected from the self-regulating functioning of employees (both professionals and management). In other words, self-leadership of individuals and teams is needed more than in the past (Manz and Sims, 2001; Pearce and Manz, 2005; Nandram and Bindlish, 2017). Leaders have the task to foster employees’ self-managing and self-leading behaviour through empowering leadership. In more popular (academically informed) management literature, the need for “leading without authority” (Ferrazi, 2020) is stressed. Hamel and Zanini (2020) coin the term “humanocracy,” to stress that most organizations are overburdened by bureaucracy and resilient and daring organizations are needed to cope with unrelenting change and unprecedented challenges. Relevant is also the COVID-19 aftermath, that is expected to This Journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License